As I Sit To Play The Organ in the Notre Dame Cathedral – Sparks
I’m publishing this blog entry in advance, and this song gives an indication, better than any other piece of pop…
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Keep readingAs I Sit To Play The Organ in the Notre Dame Cathedral – Sparks
Stuck Between Stations by The Hold Steady
When my wife and I bought our first house, it was a small two-bedroom doer upper. It needed plenty of…
Never Talking To You Again by Hüsker Dü
I don’t want my weekly song post to turn into an obituary thread, but the world of popular music lost…
Neil Young: Five Best Albums
Neil Young has enjoyed a long and erratic music career. His first brush with fame came with Buffalo Springfield in…
Cool in the Pool – Holger Czukay
We’re reaching peak rock star death era – many of the musicians active during rock music’s formative years are reaching…
The Band: Albums Ranked from Worst to Best
After years of playing live, The Band recorded the Basement Tapes with Bob Dylan, where they developed their unique melding of rock…
I Wanna Be By Your Side – Syreeta
Not content with merely creating some of the greatest albums ever made (and winning a bucket-load of Grammy Awards) during…
Come Around – Sugar
Whether he’s recording as the guitarist and co-leader of Hüsker Dü, as a solo artist, or as the leader of…
Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft – The Carpenters
The Carpenters, from Downey California, released some transcendent songs in the early 1970s. Karen Carpenter’s beautiful voice showcased beautiful melodies…
Anchor Me by The Mutton Birds
Don McGlashan is up with Dave Dobbyn and the Finn brothers as New Zealand’s best mainstream guitar-rock writers. He’s best-known…
Sweet Freedom by Michael McDonald
When my wife and I bought our own first house, we lived next door to a young man with mental…
Tom Waits Albums: Ranked from Worst to Best
California’s Tom Waits has enjoyed a remarkable career. Emerging in the early 1970s as a whisky-soaked, piano-playing balladeer, his career…
Hey Snow White by The New Pornographers
The New Pornographers are a Canadian power pop super-group – the members were drawn together from other projects. Notable alumni…
Just A Little Lovin’ – Dusty Springfield
Dusty Springfield began her career in a folk-pop trio The Springfields with her brother Tom. When The Springfields broke up,…
Richard and Linda Thompson Albums: Ranked from Worst to Best
English folk-rock duo Richard and Linda Thompson’s career resembled a soap opera. Active as recording artists between 1974 and 1982,…
Down in Splendour by Straitjacket Fits
The small city of Dunedin, in the south of New Zealand, produced a lot of great music in the 1980s…
Hope the High Road by Jason Isbell
I’ve been very impressed by Jason Isbell’s last two albums; 2013’s Southeastern and 2015’s Something More Than Free. After sobering…
Halleluwah by Can
Germany’s Can were too ahead of their time, and too weird, to enjoy a hit record, but they were hugely…
A Rose Is Still A Rose by Aretha Franklin
For some reason I never found Aretha Franklin’s original studio albums in second-hand bins, and for years the only album…
Eleanor by Vigilantes of Love
Vigilantes of Love took their name from the New Order song ‘Love Vigilantes’. The band hailed from Athens, Georgia, a…
Pavement (by voting and webpoll)
I’ve been covering Pavement’s albums over the last week or so – revisiting their five albums has helped me to…
Trump and Climate
I know this is usually a music blog, and apologies to my regular readers for the change in topic today…
Male, Middle Class, and White
Right now, I have created 63 artist pages on this blog, and 59 of them are white. Two of the…
Inherently Sexy Barley Fields – Quotes By Sting
I’ve been covering Sting on this website this week: I generally find that his solo career is under-rated –…
Three Great Albums – Marquee Moon, Spilt Milk, and Southeastern
I’ve had a lot of time for writing recently; some leave and then a work trip with long haul flights and…
New Zealand Music Month
Each May is New Zealand Music Month. It’s a promotion that has outstayed its welcome, especially as New Zealand has…
A Duck in a Microwave – and other music jokes
Soul singer Bill Withers was one of the most universally loved performers of the rock era – does anyone not…
Van Morrison: Five Best Albums
The best albums from Van Morrison's catalogue.
Album Battle – Wilco vs Radiohead
A game I like to play on my cycle commute from work is figuring out the best band of each…
Site Updates: 500 Ratings and a New Domain
Aphoristic Album Reviews has had a couple of significant milestones this week. 500 Ratings I’ve been keeping a record of…
Rating The Beatles’ Albums
Obviously The Beatles are the most celebrated and analysed pop band in the history of music, and I don’t have…
